May 21, 2025 • 68 mins
"Why does stuff happen? Can we predict it -- and if so, what do these predictions tell us?" Loosely described, the concept of "physics" is the First Science of human civilization. In tonight's episode, Ben and Matt explore recent discoveries that may well upend humanity's understanding of reality (also, spoiler: check out our upcoming episode on dreams).
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Noel is on a big adventure, but will
be returning shortly.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Let's get physical physical
Remember that song I do?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Unfortunately I remember this song.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yes, it's not exactly you know, Politzer or Nobel Prize material.
But Matt, this evening, you and Dylan and I are
getting into physical ideas in a literal and oddly enough
abstract sense. This is going to be a kind of
loose exploration and conversation with us and with our fellow listeners,
(01:14):
because we're going to the very first science, a subject
that has thoroughly baffled humanity since antiquity, the study of
what we call physics. Did did you take many physics
classes in your school days?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
It took me a couple physics. Yeah, I did that
mostly in the college sphere, but you know a little
bit in high school. Physics are very interesting because it's
really one of the most basic sciences, yet it seems
to or it feels as though, at least from my perspective,
to be one of the most difficult to fully grasp.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah, agreed. Right, we're coming to you as a collection
of nerds from the alma matter how stuff works.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So in Georgia State University just stayed.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
And Georgia Tech and all the hits, Georgia.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Tech's a little different. That's probably a little better in
a physics course. No offense Georgia State.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Oh man, I don't know the professors at Georgia Tech.
You know this, and we know some of those professors.
They pride themselves on being pretty brutal, especially for those
poor first year students in STEM. They are you know,
I didn't go there for STEM. I went there for
International Affairs, but they they pride themselves on like failing
(02:31):
a certain number of students per course.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Oh yeah, I have several friends who were so excited
to be at Georgia Tech. They're like, oh man, we
made it, got those good grades. Got into Georgia Tech.
Holy crap this first year.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah, it's sad like the second year students in engineering,
mathematics and physics. They look like they've been in a war.
They've got that seven league stare, you know, the haunted
sunken eyes and yeah, anyway, shout out to Walkee Mount Pizza.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, well, strap in everybody, because you've got over in
this corner. A fine arts degree in video and film
production slash journalism and in international affairs student and oh
even Tennessee Palell. He says physics classes were the bulk
of his fine arts degree.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Yes, good to know. We are we are as always
unlike the nature of reality. We seek to be transparent
and understandable, like the snark there. So we're going to
go in several directions in tonight's exploration at varying velocities.
We by no means as you can tell, folks are
(03:50):
physics professors. But even you know, Matt, even from a
lay perspective, it's astonishing to note just how much strange
stuff is come from this ancient discipline recently. So Tonight's
question that we were talking about at length off air
over the past few months could civilization be close to
(04:12):
breaking physics, as in, will new discoveries soon fundamentally rock
our understanding of this crucial science?
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah? What happens if the math doesn't work out for
some reason? We base everything and whether or not the
math works right with the equation? Okay, is that? Does
it function in that way? What if that part doesn't matter?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Right?
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Right?
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Why is there so much emphasis put on the observable
part of observable universe? And what happens when we start
observing things we simply could not observe previously? Here are
(05:02):
the facts all right? Well, as we always do, we
decided that it is important to understand what physics is
for all of our fellow non physics professors in the crowd.
We got to answer that question before we get into
the nerdy controversies and conspiracies surrounding physics today. I mean, look,
(05:27):
the basic story of physics is amazing, dude. How it
is a discipline today, a field of study, What it is?
How it came to be? I think we got really
close right there at the top, But let's just spell
it out for everybody. What is physics?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Okay? So you are a form of consciousness hearing this.
You're inside what we call a body, probably hopefully, and
that body interacts with stuff that's outside of the body
and everything that you can interact with, and everything your
body is, and all like, all the way up to
(06:08):
the largest things, all the way down to the tiniest components.
Physics is the study of how all of that stuff
works together to give you this experience that we call consciousness.
Is that a way to put it in?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I like that. I think you've got some poetry to
that one, Matt, because it's a We call it the
first science, and that is also quetic, but it is
not hyperbole. It's just what you described there, the structure
of matter, the interactions between the fundamental components of again
the observable universe. So as you were saying, everything from
(06:48):
the mighty macrocosmic movements of galaxies and the heavens to
the activity at the tiny, tiny, tiny sub microscopic levels
all the way down to quarks itself. For etymology, Fans
in the crowd comes from Latin physica, which just means
study of nature, simple enough. That comes from a Greek
(07:09):
word thusik natural science, and that comes from another Greek word,
theusis meaning origin, nature, property. In this sense, physics is
the grand attempt to learn how everything called reality works
and what can be observed from it. So, no, biggie,
(07:30):
you know, it's like, what are you doing this weekend?
Just figure out physics.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
It really is the great work. I mean, there are
different versions of the great work, but the great work
is just figuring out what in the hell is going on?
What is this stuff that we're moving through? And within
physics you get studies of time, because ultimately that is
how does this stuff, all these components, how do they
(07:55):
work together from this moment to this moment to that
moment to you know, to two hundred million years ago
to a billion years from now.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Yeah, exactly. And what happens when linear time, one of
our foundational assumptions or axioms, no longer seems the whole true?
This gets nuts so quickly, all right. The goal of
physics has always been to create a streamlined, consistent collection
of just a few principles that apply to everything, explain
(08:31):
all the apparent contradictions between different interactions and processes, and
also to explain how those things work together to create
this culmination of mechanics right that we call the universe
and indeed consciousness. And to get a little ridiculous historian
(08:52):
about this, Yeah, it's the oldest, most fundamental branch of
modern science, and its origin story as a result of
being so important and so baffling, the origin story is
inspiring and super frustrating, mainly because civilization learns one thing
and says, Okay, we got it right, thermodynamics super solid. Good,
(09:18):
that great job, team, that's lunch. But the more new
stuff we seem to learn, the more challenges arise to
things that we thought were conclusively solved. I mean, you know,
this reminds me of our series on Weirdly enough astronomy
or astrology, I should say, and governmental figures, right, because
(09:41):
modern physics comes about because people started practicing astrology.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Oh yeah, well, and it pops up independently. I'm not
kidding when I'm not trying to be weird when I
say you are a point of consciousness, and everything we
observe from that point of consciousness is reality. I just
mean that's what every human being has experienced that is
born and then can see and can hear and is
(10:12):
just looking out and I'm looking around and you see
the stuff, right, and you can figure out that that's
a tree because somebody hopefully tells you it's a tree,
or you named it a tree, or in whatever language
you speak, right, But every one of those people also
was able to look up at those times, wherever they were,
whenever they were, and see the heavens and that thing,
(10:36):
that moment of being able to observe something that is
so far away or just all you can do is
see it. You can't ever touch it, you can't ever
smell it or use your other senses on it. You
can just see it and you know it's there. I
think all of humanity across the world, when they look up,
they go, what is that? Why is that? And what
(10:57):
does that mean? Right?
Speaker 3 (10:59):
What does it all mean? Yeah, to quote Philharmonic, what's
it all mean? I used to say, and you remember this,
I used to often in more nihilistic days, just note
that everything, including humans, were simply objects in space. But
I think it's more appropriate to say, from the standpoint
(11:21):
of physics, it's more appropriate to say, everything and every
consciousness is a series of processes existing in space. Right.
You are kind of a song that you sing to yourself. Right.
That gets us to the other things like we said,
this is going to be loose. But that gets us
to the idea of duplicating consciousness through electronic means. Could
(11:43):
you simply emulate a pattern? If so, does that mean
you could zeros a soul? Or what passes for a soul?
These are deep questions, But these are also the kind
of deep questions, surprisingly, that physicists will deal with because
their roots come their roots arive from astrology, a natural philosophy.
(12:06):
You know, in those early evenings that you just described,
met science and spirituality were inseparable, and these were smart people.
Early scholars could say, predict eclipses, the passage of the seasons.
They would know about changes in the weather up there
with a lot of modern meteorologists. But the difference was
(12:28):
they were much more likely to assign divine or spiritual
agency to those observations. So now it's not it's not
necessarily a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse because of
the passage of Earth in a heliocentric system. Instead, God
(12:50):
is angry, right, and God told you God was going
to be.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Angry later certainly, absolutely all right.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
This whole spirituality science, it begins to change back in
the sixth century BCE, as we call it now. This
is where scientific thought emerges in ancient Greece, and this
is where we introduce our first hero of the story.
You can hear him coming, a guy named Tales of Militis,
(13:19):
who is often cited as the first physicist ever.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Oh yeah, this dude's awesome. This dude's super awesome. He
thought that water was the basis of all matter, but
I would argue he wasn't that far off. It just
would be the basis of all known life. Water is certainly, yeah,
the basis of all known life, but not matter. There's
(13:49):
other stuff going on.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Right, Yeah, and this guy, you know it is defense.
He had have a microscope, right, He didn't have a
particle accelerator or any of the cool new toys we
have in modern evenings. But he did spend a lot
of time in deep thought. And you could argue then,
with that ability, he had a distinct advantage over a
(14:11):
lot of modern society today, which does not really prize
deep thought. So he gets that part wrong, But I
agree with you, man, he was onto something. Another thing
he and his contemporaries did. This is their real sleeper hit.
They said, we're going to attempt to explain the world
around us without resorting to mythology or spirituality. Sure, Zeus
(14:37):
is the god who commands lightning, right, but what if
you know, what if we could explain it without Zeus?
Is he was gonna get mad? Or can we just
figure out what's going on? Well?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah, even if it is still Zeus making the lightning,
how does Zeus's lightning work? What happens here physically? An
hour plane? When Zeus decides to throw some lightning, that's
pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Right, because there has to be some process, right, there
has to be some sort of method to the madness.
In their pursuit to do this, they create a philosophical
basis for rational inquiry, and the roots of this are
still very much the formative basis of modern science today.
(15:29):
They called this natural philosophy, meaning let's think about natural
processes without leaning on gods and spirits as a crutch.
Now this sounds very obvious, of course, in a secular
modern world. But this was like a banger. This was
a banger dangerous idea when it happened. And then you
(15:49):
got folks like Pythagoras, a favorite of both of ours.
Pythagoras supertomath, and he said, look, everything you see or
encounter can be explained, discovered, understood via the beautiful art
and science of mathematics. And then you got folks like Democritis,
(16:09):
who speculated. He walked up. This is brilliant. This is
so weird. This guy thousands of years ago walked up
one day and said, you know what, I've been working
with one of my teachers, and we think all matter
is not necessarily made of water, no shade on a thalais.
But we think all matter is composed of tiny, tiny
(16:33):
little things. They're called atoms. They're the smallest thing. They're
so small you can't see them, you can't divide them.
He was wrong about that. History would show and people said, oh,
ty dude, do you have any evidence for this? And
he went, ah, I just I got a hunch, I
got a feeling, I got a spidy sense. And people said, okay, yeah,
(16:56):
that's interesting. We're going to put your ideas right here
on the fridge.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Uh yeah, it was no fridge.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
There was no fridge. Two thousand years later, though, atomic
theory proves the the broad strokes of his philosophy to
be correct, and there there are plenty of missteps along
the way.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
A lot of the scientific shibbylists have informed Western thought
for centuries and centuries, like the you know, we've all
heard of this, the idea that, uh, the universe can
be described as four elements earth, air, fire, water. Later
someone says quintessence, right, is is a fifth state of matter,
(17:40):
and that is the uh that is the great bull
or sphere of the heavens. Uh.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
That's cool. That's a cool thought. It's a really cool thought.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
The just the Adams thing. We're already breaking things down
as far as they can go, even though there's no microscopes,
as you said, humanity is attempting to go as deep
as we can, right, and we are also in this
time building pieces of glass that can see further and
further into space, therefore larger and larger things at the
(18:12):
same time.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
So it is just.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Really it's cool to think that humanity is exploring the
concepts of above end below simultaneously, and those two different
disciplines or those two different pursuits are increasing on this
line that we can kind of follow. We can look
at this graph as like man's ability to break down
things and get deeper is not exactly simultaneously, but increasing
(18:39):
in the same way. That is, to see larger, deeper, older.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Things, absolutely expanding concurrently toward both ends of an observable spectrum,
and then getting to the edge of that spectrum and
asking what else is out there in that horizon or indeed,
that chasm.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
And then the next piece of technology comes along and
you do get to go a little bit further right,
just a little bit, just a little.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
And then you look back and you realize, oh, crap, yep,
the other stuff was wrong. So you know, we got
to shout out so many people. We're not going to
get to the mall, but let's shout out Aristotle. He's
kind of the Lebron or the Michael Jordan of physics
during his time. So this guy sits down, hey, looks
at everybody else's ideas. They're all the ones that he
(19:26):
can access, right, all the stuff he's read, and he's
very well read for his time, and he says, let
me bring all these things together. Let's make one sort
of posse mixtape theory about the way the universe and
reality works. He also is imperfect. He popularizes the cartoonishly
(19:49):
incorrect idea of a geocentric heavenly system, meaning Earth is
in the middle. But hey, even Michael Jordan didn't make
every li up. The thing is, people respected Aristotle so
so much that he got just enough right for both
his correct ideas and his incorrect ideas to dominate European
(20:13):
science and Islamic science for thousands of years after his death.
At that point, the modern world does owe a lot
of debt to the Islamic Golden Age, wherein Muslim scholars
preserved and elaborated on Greek thought, as Europe largely languished,
(20:34):
you know, and a lot of people have a problem
with describing that era as the Dark Ages. But Europe was,
you know, fallen. I was going to say falling off
the horse. I don't know if that's an idiom in English.
Europe has fallen behind, and some of this knowledge could
have been lost to antiquity had it not been for
(20:56):
the brilliant Muslim scholars of the Islamic Golden Age. And
now we see. Physics therefore becomes this intergenerational global historic epic.
It spans all races, all creeds, all cultures, all religions.
There are too many luminaries for Matt and I to
shout out here. I mean, just think of the scientific
revolution alone, right, But we could argue this is a
(21:19):
good thing, because it turns out it takes a lot
of people working together over time to understand what we
call the universe, or even to define the universe.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
And with all of that, years and years pass, at
least as we experience them, and human beings are born
and die, and born and die, born and die, and
finally we arrive at the modern day, where there are
scientists across the globe attempting to search for things we
(21:52):
have yet to fully grasp, and even the things that
we think we grasp, there are scientists attempting to break
those systems and those thoughts so that we can move
forward in maybe a different way, because just like back then,
as we described in Europe, maybe our thinking is stuck
in some ways or you know, went back the wrong
(22:12):
way and we just haven't realized it yet. And that
is super freaking cool.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, Yeah, I think physics is best understood as a
conversation rather than a set of tablets and directives, almost
a philosophy stone. Yes, very much so. Yeah, especially when
you get to the edges, which we'll talk about. You
know any as any hapless undergrad student can assure you
(22:38):
and shout out, by the way to all the up
and coming college students who just got their acceptance letters,
congratulations and good luck. But if you are a hapless
undergrad student, then you know well that physics is deceptively
deep water. It starts out simple enough, right, Thermodynamics, I
(23:00):
get it, the creation, destruction, et cetera, transformation matter, I
get it. But then you turn to the next page,
and this quickly becomes so complicated and like you were saying,
if you go far enough into the outskirts of accepted thought,
if you go out there to the bleeding edge, the
ink of science that has yet to be determined, you'll
(23:22):
hit a conceptual landscape that feels a lot less like
stem and a lot more like philosophy or metaphysics. They'll
readily admit this the world's greatest physicist, especially with the
crazy questions they're essentially guessing. They're leveraging thousands of years
(23:43):
of knowledge beforehand, their own deep acumen, theoretical analysis and experiments.
But these guys literally make bets with each other about
a possibility or a theory, and it's almost never a
huge amount of money. It's like, I bet you a
dollar that this is the thing about black holes, and
(24:04):
the other guy says, all right, tally hope you know.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
And then nobody gets paid ever, because when will we
find out about black holes? One day?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Maybe? Oh gosh, hopefully in time. So this is inspiring,
frustrating stuff. And here we are twenty twenty five. That's
just a brief look at the origin of physics. There
seems to be something new ever on the horizon, and
I think a big part of that is due to
technological breakthroughs that have made it possible to prove some
(24:36):
of these guesses, models or theories. The question is, could
these end up breaking the concept of traditional physics as
we know it?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yes, yes, and we'll tell you about those in just
a moment.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So, as we know,
like actually yes, so bizarre, how bizarre? How bizarre? There
are different branches of study in physics. We all know
that classical physics is concerned with the stuff you see
every day. I pick up a I pick up a wallet,
(25:21):
I drop the wallet. Gravity, right, and you can always
encounter gravity on the planet in your day to day activities.
It's kind of a Goldilocks zone of phenomenon, right, So
we're dealing with speeds that are always much lower than
the speed of light. We're dealing with sizes to your point,
(25:43):
matt that are much larger than atoms, but there's still
like in astronomical terms, they're T T and T tiny,
and really human civilization is pretty good at understanding stuff
on this level. The problem is, as you alluded to,
once we get the very extreme ends of the spectrum,
the very very tidy stuff, the very very big stuff,
(26:06):
those rules are less sacro sanct They get fuzzy, they
start to erode.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Yeah, that's where you get, you know, miles and miles
of a tube that's filled with magnets, and then we
throw at single atoms around and accelerate them until they
get crazy fast, almost the speed of light, and then
smash them together and see what happens after. And then
you find new particles that you didn't know existing, or
(26:33):
sub atomic particles and stuff that goes even deeper than that.
That's uh, that's when you get the black hole stuff,
and you try and speculate on what does the black
hole actually look like and how does it actually function?
This thing that we kind of observe out there.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Right, Yeah, this is the rise of what we call
modern physics. And you have to wonder what history we'll
call modern physics in the future. It's just a trick term,
you know. It's like that irritating term in literature, postmodern.
The heck is postmodern anyway, So.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Just quantum correct, But there we go.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
I like that. I'm more into quantum literature. I've written
all the novels at once shut out Borges. But okay,
modern physics. Now we're talking high velocities, very tiny, tiny distances,
very large energies. This is where you find relativity, very
high energy, special relativity speeds kind of like the speed
(27:32):
of light, and of course the infamous quantum mechanics. That's
the thing, man. Despite the fact that many undergrad or
high school students may feel physics is a series of
commandments set in stone. As an overall concept, it is
(27:52):
riddled with unsolved problems and what appeared to be a
lot of self contradictions. You know, some existing theories. No
existing theory can explain everything, right, we we can explain
some observed phenomena, and we're like, okay, under this theory,
this works, This makes sense. And then someone else from
(28:13):
like across the hall in the lab goes, oh hey god,
uh Matt, Matt, you gotta dude, you gotta come see
these quarts, bro.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
What that doesn't fit with my models?
Speaker 3 (28:27):
We need we need new models. As they say in Vogue.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
In short, I don't know. It's weird. We know a
thing does happen, and we can prove it, but we're
not sure how it happens or why, and perhaps most importantly,
we don't know how to square it with other related
areas of inquiry. That's why you know, the Golden Goose,
the Holy Grail is the idea of a theory of everything.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Oh yeah, well, and we still have that pesky little
problem of we're unsure if observing something changes what happens.
We still don't know if that's certain or not. Does
it matter that we're observing it? Since we're observing it,
is it different than it would have been if we
weren't here.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Like the double slit experiment. Yeah, that's a famous example.
It's still a thing, oh very much so. Yeah, no
one's answered that one. It's the theory of everything? Is
this ancient game, right dating back to Aristotle. If we
could just have one set of rules, hopefully a brief
set of rules that explain how all of these seemingly
(29:35):
contradicting things work together, work in concert to form what
we observe is reality, then boom, We've won physics. Spoiler,
civilization has not won physics yet. I was remembering in
our research for this, I noticed an interesting pattern. Every
few decades or so across the span of human history,
(30:00):
someone comes forth, like a profit of old with their explanation,
their theory of everything. There was a surfer who proposed
an idea a few years ago. There have been various artists,
various scientists who have done the same, but none of
these ideas have been fully accepted by the scientific community
at large, because it is incredibly common for someone to
(30:27):
propose something like a reconciliation of existing theories, or a
grand theory of everything, a grand unified theory, and then
have some other guy come out, you know, from like
across the hallway in the lab or in the academy
or something, and say, yeah, but it doesn't explain this
part though.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, Well, imagine what would happen if somebody truly came
forth with a new theory of everything that was the
real one, the actual one, and got everything right. It
would disprove so many other things that we take for
granted right now as being true that it would be
really difficult for us to accept, and we might just
throw it out immediately and we say, no, that's hogwash.
(31:09):
But it was the right one, Like the tiny little
vibrating strings I'm still.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Bidding strings theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's a pretty
interesting one too. Yeah. I think that's a great observation, man,
because now we see that it may be inconvenient to
accept a theory or a unified theory might require such
a vast, comprehensive overhaul of existing accepted thought that it
(31:35):
would feel like all the other work was for naught,
you know, which is something you have to be ready
for in science. Science is I can't remember if I
sent this to you. There was this great stand up
clip where this guy was saying, I hate when people
say they don't believe in science. You know what that
makes you? A scientist? Scientists are constantly skept and dissing
(32:01):
on accepted science.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Right, Well, that's the whole point.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
That's the whole point.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Prove it to me. Oh yeah, tiny little vibrating strings
show me.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yeah yeah. This is this a rounding error or is
this the most important discovery in human history? I mean,
as a result, we can say new discoveries aren't really
breaking the laws of physics, and law in physics means
something way different than law in regular human terms. Instead,
(32:32):
what we find is these discoveries, which I think we'll
go into in a moment, they could be more correctly
said to break our own incorrect earlier assumptions about the
quote unquote laws of reality, because physics, it's it's fallible,
The rules aren't absolutely Okay, I was thinking of it
this way. Okay, we're driving right, we're all all four
(32:53):
of us are in the car together, you listening along
at home, Thanks for going on road trip with us.
We see a stop sign. A stop sign is an
absolute You are driving it, you approach it, you stop.
That's the law. But I would argue in this analogy,
we can learn about physics because the laws of physics
(33:13):
are much more like a bunch of extremely intelligent people
saying okay, Like if the physicists are in the car,
they're saying, we believe there is a stop sign here.
Everything we know predicts it was probably there yesterday. We
can observe that it's here now, so logically it should
be here tomorrow. But then sometimes, depending on what you
(33:35):
discover down the road, that stop sign could change to
a yield sign. It could be a totally different sign
that stop sign. That law could disappear entirely, like Newton's
law of gravity. Still can't fully explain how the orbit
of mercury works. And we've been looking at mercury forever.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
That's weird. I wonder I stop doing that, Mercury.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Get it together, Mercury, Come on, why are you so mercurial? Yeah?
Worth it keeping it? So laws have been broken, you know,
we laws of physics. So Paul M. Sutter explains this
beautifully in Discover magazine. He says, giving points to one
(34:24):
of the most famous broken laws of physics, a thing
called Bodes law. Bodes law was proposed back in seventeen
fifteen CE, and it stated what seemed to be quite
rational at the time, and said, based on what we know,
each planet should be roughly twice as far away from
the Sun as the next planet inwards. And this law
(34:47):
seemed pretty it was hot stuff because it works for
series C E, R, E S. And then the law
predicted there should be something in the region of the
asteroid belt. But the law broke down after the discovery
of Neptune, so people had to throw this one sacrisanct
(35:07):
law out with the bathwater. As of this recording, we
don't know which laws of physics may stand the test
of time. We don't know which ones will be broken next.
We can, you know, we can give you some of
the established laws that you've probably heard in school, laws
of motion, relativity, universal gravitation, thermodynamics, stuff like that. But
(35:33):
we think it's more important to talk about how humanity,
almost like the myth of Icarus, sales ever closer to
things that were once thought unattainable. One of the most
recent examples that we've had our eyes on is, of course,
the concept of nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yes, okay, so Ben and I are pretty close in
age when we were coming up, I want to get
your opinion on this bin when you were coming up
in both what I was being taught in school and
what I was looking at in popular media was the
concept of nuclear fission, breaking apart an atom and breaking
(36:16):
apart atoms to create a chain reaction was very much
a thing. That's how nuclear weapons work, that's how nuclear
power works. Understandable, This concept of fusing atoms together and
creating a chain reaction of fusing atoms was a theoretical
thing that we might be able to do one day
(36:36):
in the future. But right now it's just I don't know,
I don't know. There's it seems almost it seems impossible
at this point.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Because we knew we knew it was possible for it
to occur as a natural process. Yes, we did not
know whether humans could jerry rig up the technology to
do it on our own.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah, how could we create an environment where that type
of plasma would be formed and then be steady and
you know, to be able to function and continue that
reaction right at least in a chain reaction that lasts
until you turn it off. Basically, Well, gosh, it was
the early this year when that we I think we
(37:16):
talked about it on Strange News or at least maybe
you mentioned it at least been Yeah, the artificial sun
that China's been working on out broke. It broke one
thousand seconds of steady looping plasma. Hm, would you know, incredible,
Like if humans can actually harness that type of power
(37:37):
that changes everything.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Yeah, and this is a fantastic example. We did mention
this on Strange News, I believe briefly, but this is
a fantastic example of how things that can look academic
and maybe the fiscal conservatives look like a waste of time.
This is a perfect example of how this does apply. Right. Physics,
(38:00):
the theories, the models, the principles of physics, as imperfect
as some may be, do give us entry into amazing
technology infusion. Of course, fusion can be scary to a
lot of people right for a lot of reasons. But
it's important to do the cost benefit analysis. If fusion
(38:22):
is possible, especially under a certain price point with the
right constraints, then this could mean clean energy for the world,
And the implications there just like the implications of an
apple falling on Newton's head, right, The implications there go
far beyond the initial foray into the field. So you know,
(38:47):
I think it's also worth us noting that despite rising
geopolitical tensions, which almost always hurt scientific endeavors as much
as they power them, a lot of the scientists who
exist in China or India or the US or Brazil
or Russia wherever. Right, they are always trying to hang
(39:12):
out with each other. I mean, yeah, they're humans, so
they might have egos and stuff. But if you were
a person who had spent your life researching and experimenting
with something that only like twenty other people could understand,
you'd want to hang out with those twenty people, you
know what I mean. It's like it's like, be very
(39:33):
into a specific genre of music, you want to hang
out on that subreddit.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh sure, or somebody who's into MTG. It's very similar. Anyway.
You just want to hang out with people that understand
what you understand, so you don't have to go explaining
everything to everybody at all times, right, or you don't
want to feel like a weirdo that wants to talk
about something real specific like how much manna it costs anyway.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
And why some cards or tournament legal in some or not. Yes.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Absolutely, And we also have to remember that all of these,
you know, the people who want to hang out and
talk with each other, are also working for I was
going to say companies in the Fourth States, it's.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
The MIL the military industrial legislative complex.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, kind of. But if you look at what's happening
out in Massachusetts right now. Just if we're going to
take this concept of nuclear fusion as a possible game
changer for how countries can operate, how the world could operate.
There's a fusion reactor that's being built in Massachusetts right now.
There's one out in Chesterfield County, Virginia that's being built.
(40:47):
This concept or maybe betting on the future of what
physics could achieve, happens within the state. You know, the
functional countries where they are betting. They're betting on this
stuff that it's going to work out, and spending tons
and tons of money on it because if you do win,
then your country is ahead of everybody else.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
It's a real shame that is not that is that
it isn't more of what you're describing Ben with all
the intelligent people getting together and figuring out how to
do this new stuff and then everybody gets to do
it so that the whole so that all ships can rise.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
Yeah, but they don't know like that. We have to
remember there the shadow of Kissinger and real politics still
looms large. And quite a few, quite a few world
powers who control scientific endeavors they see they see humanity
as not a collaborative game of long form improv. They
(41:48):
see it as a zero sum rush for resources, with
benefit being defined as detriment to another culture, civilization, society,
or player. So this style, this stymis the research. And
it's really interesting too. This is not unique to the
(42:08):
current era and the current discourse intentions. It shows us
that throughout history, political machination has stymied scientific endeavors's. It
would be fascinating to travel to a universe maybe one
spin to the left or whatever, and see what would
(42:30):
what twenty twenty five would be like if people had
just worked together more often, you know what I mean?
Like the space The fact that the space race happened
is amazing because it kind of happened out of spite.
I don't know if world governments would have paid if
they saw it just as pure science. I think they felt,
(42:51):
like Cold War style, they needed an enemy, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, and they also wanted to have a cool new
place to shoot missiles from.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Sure, yeah, and a cool vantage point, a new perspective
for other missiles. And you know what's going on in
the stands. Anyway, This gets us to this gets us
to larger conversations. We said this was going to be
pretty loose. Maybe we take a pause for a word
from our sponsors, and we dive into some more things
(43:22):
that allegedly break, if not laws, some assumptions about physics.
All right, we're back. Okay, you might be saying, I
get it. Physics is best understood as a continuing conversation. Okay, fine,
(43:44):
very few principles are really set in stone. But come on, guys,
we know some basics, right, Like, give me states of matter.
At least tell me states of matter? Is you know
we figured that one out. You got your gases, you
got your liquids, you got your solids, you got little plasma, right.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
And you've got earth, air, water, and fire, well ice.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Maybe. As David Neild explains writing for Science Alert, quote,
states of matter describe how particles can interact with one another,
giving rise to structures in various ways of behaving. So
if you lock atoms in place, boom, you got a solid.
You allow those bad boys to flow. He doesn't say
(44:26):
bad boys. I'm saying bad boys. You allow them to flow.
You have a liquid or a gas, you force charged
partnerships apart, and you have a plasma. So boom done, right,
we at least figured out matter, except we haven't.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
Yeah, we kind of did, except we figured out through
those particle accelerators and smashing atoms together, that certain subatomic
particles spin.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
They spin in different ways, They spin in cycles, sometimes up,
sometimes down, and those little bitty things that spin in
different directions do different things. And when you can get
them spinning in certain ways, you can create literally new
forms of matter.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Yeah. Back in twenty twenty three, scientists working in the
US and China discovered a new state of matter, the
chiro Bo's liquid state c h I r al Bo's
liquid nothing to do with the bo speakers. Sadly, you're
not going to find this form of matter sold in
(45:35):
your grocery store. Instead, Okay, we can't get too deep
here because we're not professors. But instead, this matter exists
in a thing that is so confusing it's literally called
a quote frustrated quantum system. Yes, which sounds like, you know,
an album name for a post rock band.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, it's fair. Look, and here's the guy with a
video degree saying this is confusing you, Ben, I'm not
even gonna try.
Speaker 3 (46:09):
Okay, here, we'll try we'll try together and then Dylan,
if we get it wrong, we're gonna forward the emails
to our complaint department. Jonathan Strickland at iHeartMedia dot com.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
Okay, uh, let me give you something that is a quote.
Here's a quote from tiggerin Sedrican Sedric Jan from the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. This is how the constraints are
controlled for the particles and they get frustrated. Here's the quote.
(46:43):
It's like a game of musical chairs designed to frustrate
the electrons. Instead of each electron having one chair to
go to, they must now scramble and have many possibilities
in where they sit.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Yeah. So okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it, allergy.
That's one of the best ways to learn. Right, this
system that they created, this frustrated quantum system ten ten
on the name guys, no notes, Like you said, Matt,
it prevents particles from doing the normal predictable interactions that
(47:17):
they would have in any other system. Right. The musical
chairs analogy is pretty cool. It's important to note this
is not just a theory that sounds good on paper.
These folks actually got together and the boffins built a system,
a real life physical system. It's a semiconducting device, and
(47:37):
it's got two layers. The top layer has an embarrassment
of electrons and the bottom layer has a bunch of
holes for the electrons to naturally traverse into thing is
as said Rakken, saying, there are not enough holes for
all the little electro buddies. So essentially, by these poor
(48:01):
electrons and leaving some homeless, these physicists redefined some of
our most basic assumptions about the nature of matter. I
think the Greeks would be impressed or you know, maybe terrified,
maybe both. Maybe they would say, hey, guys, stop.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Like why are you doing this?
Speaker 3 (48:21):
Guys? We told you it's earth, it's air, it's water,
and it's fire.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Please stop be dicks.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
We forgot heart, and of course heart which comes with
a monkey. So we were also talking about this briefly
off are. That's one example, but it turns out there
are multiple examples of what technically qualifies new states of matter.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
This is the one that okay, we got to talk
about it for a second. Fire and ice half ice,
half fire, right, Why, it's a new thing. That's what
I was talking about with the spin. It's it's quantumly
linked particles that have weird spin that are both fire
and ice but not really. They have upspin and downspin cycles,
(49:07):
and when they do that, they get weird and they
do weird stuff that I don't understand. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
Yeah, I think it goes back to a quote we'll
get to in a moment, which means so much to
all of us and hopefully to you listening along at home. Yeah,
the half ice, half fire phase of matter they call it.
You can read more about it in fizz dot org,
(49:33):
phys dot org. A great article by Lauren mcdrichian west
Over at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Half eyes, half fire
physicists discover new phase of matter in a magnetic material. Look.
We read through this, and we also read through a
description of the work by the researchers responsible for this discovery,
(50:00):
and gotta be honest, deep water right counterintuitive if we're
being diplomatic. And the idea here is that if they
find a new state of matter with what are described
as exotic physical properties, and if they can take that
(50:20):
learning and control the movement between those two states, the
ice and the fire as it were, then it could
lead to some huge advances in quantum computing like it
could have real world applications. This is not just a
bunch of people growing rock crystals or sea monkeys, you
(50:41):
know what I mean. This could change the world.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Yeah, it is for Qanna because because again, the quantum
computing is the concept of having a thing that is
both on and off essentially simultaneously. Right, So in human
beings are using it for computing purposes right now. Who
knows what else we could be using it for that
we're just not thinking about yet. Which is one of
(51:04):
the coolest things about this That Life Science article was
written just on April first of this year, which means
we're just on the cusp of understanding what the heck,
what does that mean and how do we use it?
Even the amazingly brilliant people who discovered it are saying, hey,
despite this is a quote, despite our extensive research, we
(51:24):
still don't know how this state could be utilized. We're
missing pieces of the puzzle.
Speaker 3 (51:28):
Mm exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Yeah, sorry, it just it blows your mind. It blows
my mind a little bit, agreed.
Speaker 3 (51:34):
I think if that doesn't blow your mind, you're either
what of the most intelligent physicists on the planet, or
you're not really thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Oh okay, well let's think about it. Let's go to
the quantum level. Some of the crazy stuff we talked
about on Strange News recently. Didn't we talk about how
energy was quantumly telep pretty recently?
Speaker 3 (52:02):
I can't remember if we talked about an air but yeah,
they were able to transport it outside of the usual constraints,
which would be very very low temperatures.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
But they're saying it. They're saying, okay, because I don't
fully understand it.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
Guys, they're saying they could move energy on a quantum
level without the same assumptive constraints that have always existed
in classical physics.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah, they wormhold energy from one place to another without
going without that energy traveling through the space in between
the two points.
Speaker 3 (52:37):
They essentially teleported it.
Speaker 2 (52:39):
That's exactly what And this is twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3 (52:45):
What I mean superpositioning alone is you know what, let's
do it first. There are even more new states of
matter that are well on the way. We want to
thank everybody's doing the research for that. May regrets saying this,
but if you're a physicist, let us know the most
exciting unsolved problems in physics. Let us know the experiments
(53:07):
that weird you out the most. Let's go to quantum jazz.
While we're waiting on those emails. One of our favorite
quotes about quantum mechanics comes from a legendary professor, Professor
Rama Murty Shankar. And if it's okay, Matt, I'd love
to play just a brief clip of his bigger line.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
Oh I know this one.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
You remember this one?
Speaker 5 (53:31):
Man, one of the big figures in physics used to say,
no one understands quantum mechanics. So in some sense the
pressure is off for you guys, because I don't get it,
and you don't get it, and Fineman doesn't get it.
Speaker 2 (53:45):
The point is, here's my goal.
Speaker 5 (53:48):
Right now, I'm the only one who doesn't understand quantum mechanics.
In about seven days, all if you will be unable
to understand quantum mechanics, then you can go back and
spread your ignorance everywhere else.
Speaker 2 (54:02):
Boom. Not really because we don't understand it yet.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
What a cool guy, though, you know what I mean.
I've watched I've watched other lectures by this professor and
just an amazing, an amazing mind, and that I think
that stands out to us because it is one it's
super humble, but it's also one of like the best
(54:28):
descriptions of how learning quantum mechanics works. You learn enough
to realize that you don't get it, and that's from
that's from multiple professors echo that statement.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
And so why are people so befuddled? It's because quantum mechanics,
which is the fancy way of saying science dealing with
the behavior of matter and light on those atomic and
subatomic scales, quantum mechanics has a different set of rules
of the road and we haven't fully figured those out yet.
(55:04):
It seems to agree with some established principles, models, and theories,
and then it kind of plays jazz with the rest
of it. You know, it treats the stop sign in
our earlier analogy like a suggestion, or it both stops
and doesn't stop at the same time, or you know,
it does every imaginable action until you look at it.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yes, yes, and there are actual quantum computers right now
that are functional in being worked on and being used
to simulate like we were talking about energy transportation right
or energy energy teleportation. There are quantum computers that use
these concepts right now to simulate what using those concepts
(55:52):
would be like to harvest energy from far falling places
and then store them inside themselves or inside other little
cubits in the same way. And all of it just
seems it just seems impossible because because for me, a
kid that grew up on the basic physics that were
(56:14):
understood in the mid nineteen nineties, all of this stuff
was so outside of the realm of possibility that it
really does. Man, I don't even know what I'm saying here,
just other than it doesn't seem possible that there is
a thing that exists as on and off in the
way we understand transistors, that is so tiny and you
(56:36):
can link those things up in some way and then
use those things to figure out stuff that our best
supercomputers can't do today. It doesn't compute there it is.
Speaker 3 (56:48):
Yeah, it's enough to make some people understandably want to
retreat back into Plato's cavern, you know what I mean, Like, yes, okay,
I get that it's possible, but I've feel like it
should not be possible. Where that's where, you know, you
get the old trope of the king shutting down the
(57:08):
research or people punishing Galileo. Sometimes current society will have issue,
will take issue with truths that science is figuring out,
or perhaps more dangerously, in this case, questions that science
is asking. You know, we're civilization is a little bit
better about it now, but the track record is not great.
(57:31):
There's a dirty jacket at play. Yeah, okay, let's go
to Cody Mure, writing for Quantum Magazine, who shares some
popular characters from a lot of thought experiments. There are
two infamous characters who are used pretty often, Alice and Bob.
(57:52):
So let's say Alice and Bob having a nice night
at home cooking dinner. All of a sudden, a series
of events occur. List drops a plate crash. The sound
startles Bob. Bob is cooking, he burns himself on the stove,
and reasonably he goes h. In another version of events,
(58:13):
Bob burns himself first and then cries out uh, and
this causes Alice to drop the plate crash. In classical physics,
only to your point, Matt, only one chain of events
is true A to Z one to two to three
right in linear time. In quantum mechanics, both of these
(58:35):
things can be true at once due to the phenomenon
known as superposition, and superposition is so cool, man.
Speaker 2 (58:43):
Well yeah, it's just Alice and Bob forever linked together,
burning themselves and dropping plates. Yeah, yeah, so cool. What
do you what do you think? What do you think?
The quantum quarks think about that or whatever they're called.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
They think everything at once, depending on how they're spinning.
You know what I mean? Sorry, man, this is familiar
right to any fan of fiction or film. You might
hear this loosely translated or popularized as the multiverse, And
like you were saying, Matt, all the particles exist in
(59:18):
all possible realities at once, up until the moment they
are measured. Maybe we think we're not sure. And I
feel like at this point in these conversations, just again
for transparency, Look, Tennessee, and Matt and I are not
(59:38):
currently high. It makes you feel like you're high when
you have to think about this stuff.
Speaker 2 (59:46):
Because you can hear this, my voice exists, and because
my voice exists, my mom had to exist, and because
she existed, the trees in the forest where my grandfather
grew up. You know, like all of that, all of
those things, when you think about the reality of it,
the true the true thrust of physics, trying to understand why,
(01:00:10):
why is? Why is right?
Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
What is? What is?
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
And why right?
Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
And again the damning dilemma, the bag of badgers that
we call the observable universe, which factors in human observation
of time. Right is the concept of linear time and
illusion filtered through senses that are inadequate for the totality
of reality. Is time simply one uh one nonlinear eternal
(01:00:41):
moment of the universe in some way experiencing itself through
different aspects? Is there as we're recording right now? Is
there still a moment in time where wherein Matt pursues
a different degree at Georgia State or at an entirely
different institution. Is there a world in which something like
(01:01:02):
meat does something very similar? Impossible questions to answer because
we only know the reality we can observe, and at
the risk of sounding cliche, that poses a logical issue
when we say observation may change things.
Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
Well, yeah, yes, I want to say it was last
year around this time, when I can't remember the Scientific
American or New Scientists on one of those publications wrote
something about how human brains alter time, But it's not
actually altering time. It's altering our perception of time. And
(01:01:40):
when it goes back to the observer concept of whether
or not just us observing anything, us observing the quantum level,
you know, for the first time in human history, does
that somehow alter how it functions? Or is it? Does
it all just function that way? And we're trying to
(01:02:02):
harness something you know that maybe maybe is outside of
our possible grasp just because of scale. Right.
Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
See also our conversation about the possibility of prescients or
prognostication and dreams right. And the quantum the quantum scale
function of the human brain. Right, it gets into some
very enjoyable but very treacherous waters. And with that idea
(01:02:34):
of you know, if we conflate, if we could correctly
conflate observation and consideration, think a consciousness thinking about a thing,
and then that counts as observation, right, And then that
could mean that we run into certain cognitive dangers info hazards. Right.
(01:02:56):
It's crazy, man, But I think all of this shows
us just how some purportedly ironclad laws of physics can
be and how they can truly fall short of explaining
the mechanics of what we know as reality and Matt,
we have not even explored black holes. We talked a
little bit about quarks, but we haven't gotten down into
(01:03:18):
the great pickle of what comprises a quark right now,
that's like the smallest thing. No matter how much energy
we throw at it, we can't break it into sub
quarks just yet. We haven't talked about that. We've alluded
to but have not examined technological breakthroughs that are both
powered by discoveries in physics and at the same time
(01:03:39):
powering new breakthroughs in the future. I mean, maybe it's
a story for another evening. Is this a part two?
Do we have a part two on this?
Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
You think, well, there has to be. There's a part
infinity of these episodes if we keep making them, because
stuff's getting weirder and weirder. There was a thing that
came out recently about fifty six Cuba quantum computer that officially,
for the first time, demonstrated certified randomness. Yes, we talked
about random number generators for a long time on the show,
(01:04:10):
and what does that mean and how do you get that?
And the new quantum stuff that we're talking about just
officially did it? Pretty pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
And there's a new pope, you know what I mean.
It's all Abouty's game.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
It's like maybe he can come in and really solidify
some of the stuff, you know, like yeah, how things.
Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
Weren't And Dylan asked, what if infinite parts of this
series already exist? Love it? Love the optimism there. Well, well,
at the very least, there is a universe, this universe
wherein we continue this show most importantly with you, fellow
(01:04:51):
conspiracy realist. I don't know, Matt, you know, in some
way to wax a little, a little too poetic. Perhaps
the first science isn't just this exploration of reality. It's
kind of a metaphor, right for humanity's unquenchable curiosity. I
(01:05:11):
sound like I'm in a weed shop or a dispenser
in California.
Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
Yeah, man, science be cool. Science is badass. It's just
some of the things that are happening. I can only
see them being weaponized some of Like when you're talking
about quantum advancements, it'd be a beautiful world if we
could actually use that stuff to make everybody's life better,
(01:05:39):
to make you know, to clean up the earth, to
make everything cool and hippie like that. I'll be down
with that. But it's not it's gonna be weaponized. It's
all gonna be weaponized until we can somehow drive all
the weapons you know, into dust.
Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Weaponized, commodified, Yeah, leveraged. I agree, especially with the constant
hunt for funding. Right that is, the best explanation or
the best historical pitch for funding is ultimately going to
be some kind of geopolitical edge or military application, which
(01:06:15):
is a shame. You know that war should be such
a great driver of innovation. But since the first moment
early humans looked at the stars, millennia and millennia go,
civilization is still I would say, even without the military applications.
Civilization is searching for a pattern right where we're taking
(01:06:36):
our thumb and forefinger and rubbing the weft and weave
of realities fabric, and we're always seeking a hole in
that substance, right, and maybe we can get behind the curtain,
maybe we can discover a vast conspiracy, right, the truth
that scientists and religious institutions have sought ever since we
(01:06:58):
thought to seek things. So, I don't know, man, it
looks like we just arrive at more questions than answers.
Is that a fair statement?
Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
I think so I'm just gonna sit over here and
rub the waft and weave.
Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
Well. While we do that, we want to hear from you.
What will we learn next? Should humanity? Should civilization keep
asking these questions? Or is there a moment where everybody
collectively says that's enough. We don't need to learn more.
We can't wait to hear your thoughts. You can find
us online, YouTube, Instagram, any social media that you may sip.
(01:07:37):
We are conspiracy stuff, conspiracy stuff, show some derivative thereof.
You can also find us via telephone and email.
Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Yeah, our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. When
you call in, you've got three minutes for a voicemail,
give yourself a cool nickname. Let us know if we
can use your name and message on the air. In
the message, please do say that. And hey, if you
want to contact us another way, why not send us
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
We are the entities that read every piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. In multiple universes,
the void writes back, what do we mean? You can
find out by playing along at home conspiracy at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Stuff They don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Noel is on a big adventure, but will
be returning shortly.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Let's get physical physical
Remember that song I do?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Unfortunately I remember this song.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yes, it's not exactly you know, Politzer or Nobel Prize material.
But Matt, this evening, you and Dylan and I are
getting into physical ideas in a literal and oddly enough
abstract sense. This is going to be a kind of
loose exploration and conversation with us and with our fellow listeners,
(01:14):
because we're going to the very first science, a subject
that has thoroughly baffled humanity since antiquity, the study of
what we call physics. Did did you take many physics
classes in your school days?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
It took me a couple physics. Yeah, I did that
mostly in the college sphere, but you know a little
bit in high school. Physics are very interesting because it's
really one of the most basic sciences, yet it seems
to or it feels as though, at least from my perspective,
to be one of the most difficult to fully grasp.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah, agreed. Right, we're coming to you as a collection
of nerds from the alma matter how stuff works.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
So in Georgia State University just stayed.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
And Georgia Tech and all the hits, Georgia.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Tech's a little different. That's probably a little better in
a physics course. No offense Georgia State.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Oh man, I don't know the professors at Georgia Tech.
You know this, and we know some of those professors.
They pride themselves on being pretty brutal, especially for those
poor first year students in STEM. They are you know,
I didn't go there for STEM. I went there for
International Affairs, but they they pride themselves on like failing
(02:31):
a certain number of students per course.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Oh yeah, I have several friends who were so excited
to be at Georgia Tech. They're like, oh man, we
made it, got those good grades. Got into Georgia Tech.
Holy crap this first year.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah, it's sad like the second year students in engineering,
mathematics and physics. They look like they've been in a war.
They've got that seven league stare, you know, the haunted
sunken eyes and yeah, anyway, shout out to Walkee Mount Pizza.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, well, strap in everybody, because you've got over in
this corner. A fine arts degree in video and film
production slash journalism and in international affairs student and oh
even Tennessee Palell. He says physics classes were the bulk
of his fine arts degree.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Yes, good to know. We are we are as always
unlike the nature of reality. We seek to be transparent
and understandable, like the snark there. So we're going to
go in several directions in tonight's exploration at varying velocities.
We by no means as you can tell, folks are
(03:50):
physics professors. But even you know, Matt, even from a
lay perspective, it's astonishing to note just how much strange
stuff is come from this ancient discipline recently. So Tonight's
question that we were talking about at length off air
over the past few months could civilization be close to
(04:12):
breaking physics, as in, will new discoveries soon fundamentally rock
our understanding of this crucial science?
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah? What happens if the math doesn't work out for
some reason? We base everything and whether or not the
math works right with the equation? Okay, is that? Does
it function in that way? What if that part doesn't matter?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Right?
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Right?
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Right?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Why is there so much emphasis put on the observable
part of observable universe? And what happens when we start
observing things we simply could not observe previously? Here are
(05:02):
the facts all right? Well, as we always do, we
decided that it is important to understand what physics is
for all of our fellow non physics professors in the crowd.
We got to answer that question before we get into
the nerdy controversies and conspiracies surrounding physics today. I mean, look,
(05:27):
the basic story of physics is amazing, dude. How it
is a discipline today, a field of study, What it is?
How it came to be? I think we got really
close right there at the top, But let's just spell
it out for everybody. What is physics?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Okay? So you are a form of consciousness hearing this.
You're inside what we call a body, probably hopefully, and
that body interacts with stuff that's outside of the body
and everything that you can interact with, and everything your
body is, and all like, all the way up to
(06:08):
the largest things, all the way down to the tiniest components.
Physics is the study of how all of that stuff
works together to give you this experience that we call consciousness.
Is that a way to put it in?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I like that. I think you've got some poetry to
that one, Matt, because it's a We call it the
first science, and that is also quetic, but it is
not hyperbole. It's just what you described there, the structure
of matter, the interactions between the fundamental components of again
the observable universe. So as you were saying, everything from
(06:48):
the mighty macrocosmic movements of galaxies and the heavens to
the activity at the tiny, tiny, tiny sub microscopic levels
all the way down to quarks itself. For etymology, Fans
in the crowd comes from Latin physica, which just means
study of nature, simple enough. That comes from a Greek
(07:09):
word thusik natural science, and that comes from another Greek word,
theusis meaning origin, nature, property. In this sense, physics is
the grand attempt to learn how everything called reality works
and what can be observed from it. So, no, biggie,
(07:30):
you know, it's like, what are you doing this weekend?
Just figure out physics.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
It really is the great work. I mean, there are
different versions of the great work, but the great work
is just figuring out what in the hell is going on?
What is this stuff that we're moving through? And within
physics you get studies of time, because ultimately that is
how does this stuff, all these components, how do they
(07:55):
work together from this moment to this moment to that
moment to you know, to two hundred million years ago
to a billion years from now.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Yeah, exactly. And what happens when linear time, one of
our foundational assumptions or axioms, no longer seems the whole true?
This gets nuts so quickly, all right. The goal of
physics has always been to create a streamlined, consistent collection
of just a few principles that apply to everything, explain
(08:31):
all the apparent contradictions between different interactions and processes, and
also to explain how those things work together to create
this culmination of mechanics right that we call the universe
and indeed consciousness. And to get a little ridiculous historian
(08:52):
about this, Yeah, it's the oldest, most fundamental branch of
modern science, and its origin story as a result of
being so important and so baffling, the origin story is
inspiring and super frustrating, mainly because civilization learns one thing
and says, Okay, we got it right, thermodynamics super solid. Good,
(09:18):
that great job, team, that's lunch. But the more new
stuff we seem to learn, the more challenges arise to
things that we thought were conclusively solved. I mean, you know,
this reminds me of our series on Weirdly enough astronomy
or astrology, I should say, and governmental figures, right, because
(09:41):
modern physics comes about because people started practicing astrology.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Oh yeah, well, and it pops up independently. I'm not
kidding when I'm not trying to be weird when I
say you are a point of consciousness, and everything we
observe from that point of consciousness is reality. I just
mean that's what every human being has experienced that is
born and then can see and can hear and is
(10:12):
just looking out and I'm looking around and you see
the stuff, right, and you can figure out that that's
a tree because somebody hopefully tells you it's a tree,
or you named it a tree, or in whatever language
you speak, right, But every one of those people also
was able to look up at those times, wherever they were,
whenever they were, and see the heavens and that thing,
(10:36):
that moment of being able to observe something that is
so far away or just all you can do is
see it. You can't ever touch it, you can't ever
smell it or use your other senses on it. You
can just see it and you know it's there. I
think all of humanity across the world, when they look up,
they go, what is that? Why is that? And what
(10:57):
does that mean? Right?
Speaker 3 (10:59):
What does it all mean? Yeah, to quote Philharmonic, what's
it all mean? I used to say, and you remember this,
I used to often in more nihilistic days, just note
that everything, including humans, were simply objects in space. But
I think it's more appropriate to say, from the standpoint
(11:21):
of physics, it's more appropriate to say, everything and every
consciousness is a series of processes existing in space. Right.
You are kind of a song that you sing to yourself. Right.
That gets us to the other things like we said,
this is going to be loose. But that gets us
to the idea of duplicating consciousness through electronic means. Could
(11:43):
you simply emulate a pattern? If so, does that mean
you could zeros a soul? Or what passes for a soul?
These are deep questions, But these are also the kind
of deep questions, surprisingly, that physicists will deal with because
their roots come their roots arive from astrology, a natural philosophy.
(12:06):
You know, in those early evenings that you just described,
met science and spirituality were inseparable, and these were smart people.
Early scholars could say, predict eclipses, the passage of the seasons.
They would know about changes in the weather up there
with a lot of modern meteorologists. But the difference was
(12:28):
they were much more likely to assign divine or spiritual
agency to those observations. So now it's not it's not
necessarily a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse because of
the passage of Earth in a heliocentric system. Instead, God
(12:50):
is angry, right, and God told you God was going
to be.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Angry later certainly, absolutely all right.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
This whole spirituality science, it begins to change back in
the sixth century BCE, as we call it now. This
is where scientific thought emerges in ancient Greece, and this
is where we introduce our first hero of the story.
You can hear him coming, a guy named Tales of Militis,
(13:19):
who is often cited as the first physicist ever.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Oh yeah, this dude's awesome. This dude's super awesome. He
thought that water was the basis of all matter, but
I would argue he wasn't that far off. It just
would be the basis of all known life. Water is certainly, yeah,
the basis of all known life, but not matter. There's
(13:49):
other stuff going on.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Right, Yeah, and this guy, you know it is defense.
He had have a microscope, right, He didn't have a
particle accelerator or any of the cool new toys we
have in modern evenings. But he did spend a lot
of time in deep thought. And you could argue then,
with that ability, he had a distinct advantage over a
(14:11):
lot of modern society today, which does not really prize
deep thought. So he gets that part wrong, But I
agree with you, man, he was onto something. Another thing
he and his contemporaries did. This is their real sleeper hit.
They said, we're going to attempt to explain the world
around us without resorting to mythology or spirituality. Sure, Zeus
(14:37):
is the god who commands lightning, right, but what if
you know, what if we could explain it without Zeus?
Is he was gonna get mad? Or can we just
figure out what's going on? Well?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah, even if it is still Zeus making the lightning,
how does Zeus's lightning work? What happens here physically? An
hour plane? When Zeus decides to throw some lightning, that's
pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Right, because there has to be some process, right, there
has to be some sort of method to the madness.
In their pursuit to do this, they create a philosophical
basis for rational inquiry, and the roots of this are
still very much the formative basis of modern science today.
(15:29):
They called this natural philosophy, meaning let's think about natural
processes without leaning on gods and spirits as a crutch.
Now this sounds very obvious, of course, in a secular
modern world. But this was like a banger. This was
a banger dangerous idea when it happened. And then you
(15:49):
got folks like Pythagoras, a favorite of both of ours.
Pythagoras supertomath, and he said, look, everything you see or
encounter can be explained, discovered, understood via the beautiful art
and science of mathematics. And then you got folks like Democritis,
(16:09):
who speculated. He walked up. This is brilliant. This is
so weird. This guy thousands of years ago walked up
one day and said, you know what, I've been working
with one of my teachers, and we think all matter
is not necessarily made of water, no shade on a thalais.
But we think all matter is composed of tiny, tiny
(16:33):
little things. They're called atoms. They're the smallest thing. They're
so small you can't see them, you can't divide them.
He was wrong about that. History would show and people said, oh,
ty dude, do you have any evidence for this? And
he went, ah, I just I got a hunch, I
got a feeling, I got a spidy sense. And people said, okay, yeah,
(16:56):
that's interesting. We're going to put your ideas right here
on the fridge.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Uh yeah, it was no fridge.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
There was no fridge. Two thousand years later, though, atomic
theory proves the the broad strokes of his philosophy to
be correct, and there there are plenty of missteps along
the way.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
A lot of the scientific shibbylists have informed Western thought
for centuries and centuries, like the you know, we've all
heard of this, the idea that, uh, the universe can
be described as four elements earth, air, fire, water. Later
someone says quintessence, right, is is a fifth state of matter,
(17:40):
and that is the uh that is the great bull
or sphere of the heavens. Uh.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
That's cool. That's a cool thought. It's a really cool thought.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
The just the Adams thing. We're already breaking things down
as far as they can go, even though there's no microscopes,
as you said, humanity is attempting to go as deep
as we can, right, and we are also in this
time building pieces of glass that can see further and
further into space, therefore larger and larger things at the
(18:12):
same time.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
So it is just.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Really it's cool to think that humanity is exploring the
concepts of above end below simultaneously, and those two different
disciplines or those two different pursuits are increasing on this
line that we can kind of follow. We can look
at this graph as like man's ability to break down
things and get deeper is not exactly simultaneously, but increasing
(18:39):
in the same way. That is, to see larger, deeper, older.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Things, absolutely expanding concurrently toward both ends of an observable spectrum,
and then getting to the edge of that spectrum and
asking what else is out there in that horizon or indeed,
that chasm.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
And then the next piece of technology comes along and
you do get to go a little bit further right,
just a little bit, just a little.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
And then you look back and you realize, oh, crap, yep,
the other stuff was wrong. So you know, we got
to shout out so many people. We're not going to
get to the mall, but let's shout out Aristotle. He's
kind of the Lebron or the Michael Jordan of physics
during his time. So this guy sits down, hey, looks
at everybody else's ideas. They're all the ones that he
(19:26):
can access, right, all the stuff he's read, and he's
very well read for his time, and he says, let
me bring all these things together. Let's make one sort
of posse mixtape theory about the way the universe and
reality works. He also is imperfect. He popularizes the cartoonishly
(19:49):
incorrect idea of a geocentric heavenly system, meaning Earth is
in the middle. But hey, even Michael Jordan didn't make
every li up. The thing is, people respected Aristotle so
so much that he got just enough right for both
his correct ideas and his incorrect ideas to dominate European
(20:13):
science and Islamic science for thousands of years after his death.
At that point, the modern world does owe a lot
of debt to the Islamic Golden Age, wherein Muslim scholars
preserved and elaborated on Greek thought, as Europe largely languished,
(20:34):
you know, and a lot of people have a problem
with describing that era as the Dark Ages. But Europe was,
you know, fallen. I was going to say falling off
the horse. I don't know if that's an idiom in English.
Europe has fallen behind, and some of this knowledge could
have been lost to antiquity had it not been for
(20:56):
the brilliant Muslim scholars of the Islamic Golden Age. And
now we see. Physics therefore becomes this intergenerational global historic epic.
It spans all races, all creeds, all cultures, all religions.
There are too many luminaries for Matt and I to
shout out here. I mean, just think of the scientific
revolution alone, right, But we could argue this is a
(21:19):
good thing, because it turns out it takes a lot
of people working together over time to understand what we
call the universe, or even to define the universe.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
And with all of that, years and years pass, at
least as we experience them, and human beings are born
and die, and born and die, born and die, and
finally we arrive at the modern day, where there are
scientists across the globe attempting to search for things we
(21:52):
have yet to fully grasp, and even the things that
we think we grasp, there are scientists attempting to break
those systems and those thoughts so that we can move
forward in maybe a different way, because just like back then,
as we described in Europe, maybe our thinking is stuck
in some ways or you know, went back the wrong
(22:12):
way and we just haven't realized it yet. And that
is super freaking cool.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, Yeah, I think physics is best understood as a
conversation rather than a set of tablets and directives, almost
a philosophy stone. Yes, very much so. Yeah, especially when
you get to the edges, which we'll talk about. You
know any as any hapless undergrad student can assure you
(22:38):
and shout out, by the way to all the up
and coming college students who just got their acceptance letters,
congratulations and good luck. But if you are a hapless
undergrad student, then you know well that physics is deceptively
deep water. It starts out simple enough, right, Thermodynamics, I
(23:00):
get it, the creation, destruction, et cetera, transformation matter, I
get it. But then you turn to the next page,
and this quickly becomes so complicated and like you were saying,
if you go far enough into the outskirts of accepted thought,
if you go out there to the bleeding edge, the
ink of science that has yet to be determined, you'll
(23:22):
hit a conceptual landscape that feels a lot less like
stem and a lot more like philosophy or metaphysics. They'll
readily admit this the world's greatest physicist, especially with the
crazy questions they're essentially guessing. They're leveraging thousands of years
(23:43):
of knowledge beforehand, their own deep acumen, theoretical analysis and experiments.
But these guys literally make bets with each other about
a possibility or a theory, and it's almost never a
huge amount of money. It's like, I bet you a
dollar that this is the thing about black holes, and
(24:04):
the other guy says, all right, tally hope you know.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
And then nobody gets paid ever, because when will we
find out about black holes? One day?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Maybe? Oh gosh, hopefully in time. So this is inspiring,
frustrating stuff. And here we are twenty twenty five. That's
just a brief look at the origin of physics. There
seems to be something new ever on the horizon, and
I think a big part of that is due to
technological breakthroughs that have made it possible to prove some
(24:36):
of these guesses, models or theories. The question is, could
these end up breaking the concept of traditional physics as
we know it?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yes, yes, and we'll tell you about those in just
a moment.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So, as we know,
like actually yes, so bizarre, how bizarre? How bizarre? There
are different branches of study in physics. We all know
that classical physics is concerned with the stuff you see
every day. I pick up a I pick up a wallet,
(25:21):
I drop the wallet. Gravity, right, and you can always
encounter gravity on the planet in your day to day activities.
It's kind of a Goldilocks zone of phenomenon, right, So
we're dealing with speeds that are always much lower than
the speed of light. We're dealing with sizes to your point,
(25:43):
matt that are much larger than atoms, but there's still
like in astronomical terms, they're T T and T tiny,
and really human civilization is pretty good at understanding stuff
on this level. The problem is, as you alluded to,
once we get the very extreme ends of the spectrum,
the very very tidy stuff, the very very big stuff,
(26:06):
those rules are less sacro sanct They get fuzzy, they
start to erode.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Yeah, that's where you get, you know, miles and miles
of a tube that's filled with magnets, and then we
throw at single atoms around and accelerate them until they
get crazy fast, almost the speed of light, and then
smash them together and see what happens after. And then
you find new particles that you didn't know existing, or
(26:33):
sub atomic particles and stuff that goes even deeper than that.
That's uh, that's when you get the black hole stuff,
and you try and speculate on what does the black
hole actually look like and how does it actually function?
This thing that we kind of observe out there.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Right, Yeah, this is the rise of what we call
modern physics. And you have to wonder what history we'll
call modern physics in the future. It's just a trick term,
you know. It's like that irritating term in literature, postmodern.
The heck is postmodern anyway, So.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Just quantum correct, But there we go.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
I like that. I'm more into quantum literature. I've written
all the novels at once shut out Borges. But okay,
modern physics. Now we're talking high velocities, very tiny, tiny distances,
very large energies. This is where you find relativity, very
high energy, special relativity speeds kind of like the speed
(27:32):
of light, and of course the infamous quantum mechanics. That's
the thing, man. Despite the fact that many undergrad or
high school students may feel physics is a series of
commandments set in stone. As an overall concept, it is
(27:52):
riddled with unsolved problems and what appeared to be a
lot of self contradictions. You know, some existing theories. No
existing theory can explain everything, right, we we can explain
some observed phenomena, and we're like, okay, under this theory,
this works, This makes sense. And then someone else from
(28:13):
like across the hall in the lab goes, oh hey god,
uh Matt, Matt, you gotta dude, you gotta come see
these quarts, bro.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
What that doesn't fit with my models?
Speaker 3 (28:27):
We need we need new models. As they say in Vogue.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
In short, I don't know. It's weird. We know a
thing does happen, and we can prove it, but we're
not sure how it happens or why, and perhaps most importantly,
we don't know how to square it with other related
areas of inquiry. That's why you know, the Golden Goose,
the Holy Grail is the idea of a theory of everything.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Oh yeah, well, and we still have that pesky little
problem of we're unsure if observing something changes what happens.
We still don't know if that's certain or not. Does
it matter that we're observing it? Since we're observing it,
is it different than it would have been if we
weren't here.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Like the double slit experiment. Yeah, that's a famous example.
It's still a thing, oh very much so. Yeah, no
one's answered that one. It's the theory of everything? Is
this ancient game, right dating back to Aristotle. If we
could just have one set of rules, hopefully a brief
set of rules that explain how all of these seemingly
(29:35):
contradicting things work together, work in concert to form what
we observe is reality, then boom, We've won physics. Spoiler,
civilization has not won physics yet. I was remembering in
our research for this, I noticed an interesting pattern. Every
few decades or so across the span of human history,
(30:00):
someone comes forth, like a profit of old with their explanation,
their theory of everything. There was a surfer who proposed
an idea a few years ago. There have been various artists,
various scientists who have done the same, but none of
these ideas have been fully accepted by the scientific community
at large, because it is incredibly common for someone to
(30:27):
propose something like a reconciliation of existing theories, or a
grand theory of everything, a grand unified theory, and then
have some other guy come out, you know, from like
across the hallway in the lab or in the academy
or something, and say, yeah, but it doesn't explain this
part though.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, Well, imagine what would happen if somebody truly came
forth with a new theory of everything that was the
real one, the actual one, and got everything right. It
would disprove so many other things that we take for
granted right now as being true that it would be
really difficult for us to accept, and we might just
throw it out immediately and we say, no, that's hogwash.
(31:09):
But it was the right one, Like the tiny little
vibrating strings I'm still.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Bidding strings theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's a pretty
interesting one too. Yeah. I think that's a great observation, man,
because now we see that it may be inconvenient to
accept a theory or a unified theory might require such
a vast, comprehensive overhaul of existing accepted thought that it
(31:35):
would feel like all the other work was for naught,
you know, which is something you have to be ready
for in science. Science is I can't remember if I
sent this to you. There was this great stand up
clip where this guy was saying, I hate when people
say they don't believe in science. You know what that
makes you? A scientist? Scientists are constantly skept and dissing
(32:01):
on accepted science.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Right, Well, that's the whole point.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
That's the whole point.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Prove it to me. Oh yeah, tiny little vibrating strings
show me.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yeah yeah. This is this a rounding error or is
this the most important discovery in human history? I mean,
as a result, we can say new discoveries aren't really
breaking the laws of physics, and law in physics means
something way different than law in regular human terms. Instead,
(32:32):
what we find is these discoveries, which I think we'll
go into in a moment, they could be more correctly
said to break our own incorrect earlier assumptions about the
quote unquote laws of reality, because physics, it's it's fallible,
The rules aren't absolutely Okay, I was thinking of it
this way. Okay, we're driving right, we're all all four
(32:53):
of us are in the car together, you listening along
at home, Thanks for going on road trip with us.
We see a stop sign. A stop sign is an
absolute You are driving it, you approach it, you stop.
That's the law. But I would argue in this analogy,
we can learn about physics because the laws of physics
(33:13):
are much more like a bunch of extremely intelligent people
saying okay, Like if the physicists are in the car,
they're saying, we believe there is a stop sign here.
Everything we know predicts it was probably there yesterday. We
can observe that it's here now, so logically it should
be here tomorrow. But then sometimes, depending on what you
(33:35):
discover down the road, that stop sign could change to
a yield sign. It could be a totally different sign
that stop sign. That law could disappear entirely, like Newton's
law of gravity. Still can't fully explain how the orbit
of mercury works. And we've been looking at mercury forever.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
That's weird. I wonder I stop doing that, Mercury.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Get it together, Mercury, Come on, why are you so mercurial? Yeah?
Worth it keeping it? So laws have been broken, you know,
we laws of physics. So Paul M. Sutter explains this
beautifully in Discover magazine. He says, giving points to one
(34:24):
of the most famous broken laws of physics, a thing
called Bodes law. Bodes law was proposed back in seventeen
fifteen CE, and it stated what seemed to be quite
rational at the time, and said, based on what we know,
each planet should be roughly twice as far away from
the Sun as the next planet inwards. And this law
(34:47):
seemed pretty it was hot stuff because it works for
series C E, R, E S. And then the law
predicted there should be something in the region of the
asteroid belt. But the law broke down after the discovery
of Neptune, so people had to throw this one sacrisanct
(35:07):
law out with the bathwater. As of this recording, we
don't know which laws of physics may stand the test
of time. We don't know which ones will be broken next.
We can, you know, we can give you some of
the established laws that you've probably heard in school, laws
of motion, relativity, universal gravitation, thermodynamics, stuff like that. But
(35:33):
we think it's more important to talk about how humanity,
almost like the myth of Icarus, sales ever closer to
things that were once thought unattainable. One of the most
recent examples that we've had our eyes on is, of course,
the concept of nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yes, okay, so Ben and I are pretty close in
age when we were coming up, I want to get
your opinion on this bin when you were coming up
in both what I was being taught in school and
what I was looking at in popular media was the
concept of nuclear fission, breaking apart an atom and breaking
(36:16):
apart atoms to create a chain reaction was very much
a thing. That's how nuclear weapons work, that's how nuclear
power works. Understandable, This concept of fusing atoms together and
creating a chain reaction of fusing atoms was a theoretical
thing that we might be able to do one day
(36:36):
in the future. But right now it's just I don't know,
I don't know. There's it seems almost it seems impossible
at this point.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Because we knew we knew it was possible for it
to occur as a natural process. Yes, we did not
know whether humans could jerry rig up the technology to
do it on our own.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah, how could we create an environment where that type
of plasma would be formed and then be steady and
you know, to be able to function and continue that
reaction right at least in a chain reaction that lasts
until you turn it off. Basically, Well, gosh, it was
the early this year when that we I think we
(37:16):
talked about it on Strange News or at least maybe
you mentioned it at least been Yeah, the artificial sun
that China's been working on out broke. It broke one
thousand seconds of steady looping plasma. Hm, would you know, incredible,
Like if humans can actually harness that type of power
(37:37):
that changes everything.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Yeah, and this is a fantastic example. We did mention
this on Strange News, I believe briefly, but this is
a fantastic example of how things that can look academic
and maybe the fiscal conservatives look like a waste of time.
This is a perfect example of how this does apply. Right. Physics,
(38:00):
the theories, the models, the principles of physics, as imperfect
as some may be, do give us entry into amazing
technology infusion. Of course, fusion can be scary to a
lot of people right for a lot of reasons. But
it's important to do the cost benefit analysis. If fusion
(38:22):
is possible, especially under a certain price point with the
right constraints, then this could mean clean energy for the world,
And the implications there just like the implications of an
apple falling on Newton's head, right, The implications there go
far beyond the initial foray into the field. So you know,
(38:47):
I think it's also worth us noting that despite rising
geopolitical tensions, which almost always hurt scientific endeavors as much
as they power them, a lot of the scientists who
exist in China or India or the US or Brazil
or Russia wherever. Right, they are always trying to hang
(39:12):
out with each other. I mean, yeah, they're humans, so
they might have egos and stuff. But if you were
a person who had spent your life researching and experimenting
with something that only like twenty other people could understand,
you'd want to hang out with those twenty people, you
know what I mean. It's like it's like, be very
(39:33):
into a specific genre of music, you want to hang
out on that subreddit.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh sure, or somebody who's into MTG. It's very similar. Anyway.
You just want to hang out with people that understand
what you understand, so you don't have to go explaining
everything to everybody at all times, right, or you don't
want to feel like a weirdo that wants to talk
about something real specific like how much manna it costs anyway.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
And why some cards or tournament legal in some or not. Yes.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Absolutely, And we also have to remember that all of these,
you know, the people who want to hang out and
talk with each other, are also working for I was
going to say companies in the Fourth States, it's.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
The MIL the military industrial legislative complex.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, kind of. But if you look at what's happening
out in Massachusetts right now. Just if we're going to
take this concept of nuclear fusion as a possible game
changer for how countries can operate, how the world could operate.
There's a fusion reactor that's being built in Massachusetts right now.
There's one out in Chesterfield County, Virginia that's being built.
(40:47):
This concept or maybe betting on the future of what
physics could achieve, happens within the state. You know, the
functional countries where they are betting. They're betting on this
stuff that it's going to work out, and spending tons
and tons of money on it because if you do win,
then your country is ahead of everybody else.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
It's a real shame that is not that is that
it isn't more of what you're describing Ben with all
the intelligent people getting together and figuring out how to
do this new stuff and then everybody gets to do
it so that the whole so that all ships can rise.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
Yeah, but they don't know like that. We have to
remember there the shadow of Kissinger and real politics still
looms large. And quite a few, quite a few world
powers who control scientific endeavors they see they see humanity
as not a collaborative game of long form improv. They
(41:48):
see it as a zero sum rush for resources, with
benefit being defined as detriment to another culture, civilization, society,
or player. So this style, this stymis the research. And
it's really interesting too. This is not unique to the
(42:08):
current era and the current discourse intentions. It shows us
that throughout history, political machination has stymied scientific endeavors's. It
would be fascinating to travel to a universe maybe one
spin to the left or whatever, and see what would
(42:30):
what twenty twenty five would be like if people had
just worked together more often, you know what I mean?
Like the space The fact that the space race happened
is amazing because it kind of happened out of spite.
I don't know if world governments would have paid if
they saw it just as pure science. I think they felt,
(42:51):
like Cold War style, they needed an enemy, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, and they also wanted to have a cool new
place to shoot missiles from.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Sure, yeah, and a cool vantage point, a new perspective
for other missiles. And you know what's going on in
the stands. Anyway, This gets us to this gets us
to larger conversations. We said this was going to be
pretty loose. Maybe we take a pause for a word
from our sponsors, and we dive into some more things
(43:22):
that allegedly break, if not laws, some assumptions about physics.
All right, we're back. Okay, you might be saying, I
get it. Physics is best understood as a continuing conversation. Okay, fine,
(43:44):
very few principles are really set in stone. But come on, guys,
we know some basics, right, Like, give me states of matter.
At least tell me states of matter? Is you know
we figured that one out. You got your gases, you
got your liquids, you got your solids, you got little plasma, right.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
And you've got earth, air, water, and fire, well ice.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Maybe. As David Neild explains writing for Science Alert, quote,
states of matter describe how particles can interact with one another,
giving rise to structures in various ways of behaving. So
if you lock atoms in place, boom, you got a solid.
You allow those bad boys to flow. He doesn't say
(44:26):
bad boys. I'm saying bad boys. You allow them to flow.
You have a liquid or a gas, you force charged
partnerships apart, and you have a plasma. So boom done, right,
we at least figured out matter, except we haven't.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
Yeah, we kind of did, except we figured out through
those particle accelerators and smashing atoms together, that certain subatomic
particles spin.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
They spin in different ways, They spin in cycles, sometimes up,
sometimes down, and those little bitty things that spin in
different directions do different things. And when you can get
them spinning in certain ways, you can create literally new
forms of matter.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Yeah. Back in twenty twenty three, scientists working in the
US and China discovered a new state of matter, the
chiro Bo's liquid state c h I r al Bo's
liquid nothing to do with the bo speakers. Sadly, you're
not going to find this form of matter sold in
(45:35):
your grocery store. Instead, Okay, we can't get too deep
here because we're not professors. But instead, this matter exists
in a thing that is so confusing it's literally called
a quote frustrated quantum system. Yes, which sounds like, you know,
an album name for a post rock band.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, it's fair. Look, and here's the guy with a
video degree saying this is confusing you, Ben, I'm not
even gonna try.
Speaker 3 (46:09):
Okay, here, we'll try we'll try together and then Dylan,
if we get it wrong, we're gonna forward the emails
to our complaint department. Jonathan Strickland at iHeartMedia dot com.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
Okay, uh, let me give you something that is a quote.
Here's a quote from tiggerin Sedrican Sedric Jan from the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. This is how the constraints are
controlled for the particles and they get frustrated. Here's the quote.
(46:43):
It's like a game of musical chairs designed to frustrate
the electrons. Instead of each electron having one chair to
go to, they must now scramble and have many possibilities
in where they sit.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Yeah. So okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it, allergy.
That's one of the best ways to learn. Right, this
system that they created, this frustrated quantum system ten ten
on the name guys, no notes, Like you said, Matt,
it prevents particles from doing the normal predictable interactions that
(47:17):
they would have in any other system. Right. The musical
chairs analogy is pretty cool. It's important to note this
is not just a theory that sounds good on paper.
These folks actually got together and the boffins built a system,
a real life physical system. It's a semiconducting device, and
(47:37):
it's got two layers. The top layer has an embarrassment
of electrons and the bottom layer has a bunch of
holes for the electrons to naturally traverse into thing is
as said Rakken, saying, there are not enough holes for
all the little electro buddies. So essentially, by these poor
(48:01):
electrons and leaving some homeless, these physicists redefined some of
our most basic assumptions about the nature of matter. I
think the Greeks would be impressed or you know, maybe terrified,
maybe both. Maybe they would say, hey, guys, stop.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Like why are you doing this?
Speaker 3 (48:21):
Guys? We told you it's earth, it's air, it's water,
and it's fire.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Please stop be dicks.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
We forgot heart, and of course heart which comes with
a monkey. So we were also talking about this briefly
off are. That's one example, but it turns out there
are multiple examples of what technically qualifies new states of matter.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
This is the one that okay, we got to talk
about it for a second. Fire and ice half ice,
half fire, right, Why, it's a new thing. That's what
I was talking about with the spin. It's it's quantumly
linked particles that have weird spin that are both fire
and ice but not really. They have upspin and downspin cycles,
(49:07):
and when they do that, they get weird and they
do weird stuff that I don't understand. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
Yeah, I think it goes back to a quote we'll
get to in a moment, which means so much to
all of us and hopefully to you listening along at home. Yeah,
the half ice, half fire phase of matter they call it.
You can read more about it in fizz dot org,
(49:33):
phys dot org. A great article by Lauren mcdrichian west
Over at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Half eyes, half fire
physicists discover new phase of matter in a magnetic material. Look.
We read through this, and we also read through a
description of the work by the researchers responsible for this discovery,
(50:00):
and gotta be honest, deep water right counterintuitive if we're
being diplomatic. And the idea here is that if they
find a new state of matter with what are described
as exotic physical properties, and if they can take that
(50:20):
learning and control the movement between those two states, the
ice and the fire as it were, then it could
lead to some huge advances in quantum computing like it
could have real world applications. This is not just a
bunch of people growing rock crystals or sea monkeys, you
(50:41):
know what I mean. This could change the world.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Yeah, it is for Qanna because because again, the quantum
computing is the concept of having a thing that is
both on and off essentially simultaneously. Right, So in human
beings are using it for computing purposes right now. Who
knows what else we could be using it for that
we're just not thinking about yet. Which is one of
(51:04):
the coolest things about this That Life Science article was
written just on April first of this year, which means
we're just on the cusp of understanding what the heck,
what does that mean and how do we use it?
Even the amazingly brilliant people who discovered it are saying, hey,
despite this is a quote, despite our extensive research, we
(51:24):
still don't know how this state could be utilized. We're
missing pieces of the puzzle.
Speaker 3 (51:28):
Mm exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Yeah, sorry, it just it blows your mind. It blows
my mind a little bit, agreed.
Speaker 3 (51:34):
I think if that doesn't blow your mind, you're either
what of the most intelligent physicists on the planet, or
you're not really thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Oh okay, well let's think about it. Let's go to
the quantum level. Some of the crazy stuff we talked
about on Strange News recently. Didn't we talk about how
energy was quantumly telep pretty recently?
Speaker 3 (52:02):
I can't remember if we talked about an air but yeah,
they were able to transport it outside of the usual constraints,
which would be very very low temperatures.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
But they're saying it. They're saying, okay, because I don't
fully understand it.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
Guys, they're saying they could move energy on a quantum
level without the same assumptive constraints that have always existed
in classical physics.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yeah, they wormhold energy from one place to another without
going without that energy traveling through the space in between
the two points.
Speaker 3 (52:37):
They essentially teleported it.
Speaker 2 (52:39):
That's exactly what And this is twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3 (52:45):
What I mean superpositioning alone is you know what, let's
do it first. There are even more new states of
matter that are well on the way. We want to
thank everybody's doing the research for that. May regrets saying this,
but if you're a physicist, let us know the most
exciting unsolved problems in physics. Let us know the experiments
(53:07):
that weird you out the most. Let's go to quantum jazz.
While we're waiting on those emails. One of our favorite
quotes about quantum mechanics comes from a legendary professor, Professor
Rama Murty Shankar. And if it's okay, Matt, I'd love
to play just a brief clip of his bigger line.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
Oh I know this one.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
You remember this one?
Speaker 5 (53:31):
Man, one of the big figures in physics used to say,
no one understands quantum mechanics. So in some sense the
pressure is off for you guys, because I don't get it,
and you don't get it, and Fineman doesn't get it.
Speaker 2 (53:45):
The point is, here's my goal.
Speaker 5 (53:48):
Right now, I'm the only one who doesn't understand quantum mechanics.
In about seven days, all if you will be unable
to understand quantum mechanics, then you can go back and
spread your ignorance everywhere else.
Speaker 2 (54:02):
Boom. Not really because we don't understand it yet.
Speaker 3 (54:07):
What a cool guy, though, you know what I mean.
I've watched I've watched other lectures by this professor and
just an amazing, an amazing mind, and that I think
that stands out to us because it is one it's
super humble, but it's also one of like the best
(54:28):
descriptions of how learning quantum mechanics works. You learn enough
to realize that you don't get it, and that's from
that's from multiple professors echo that statement.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
And so why are people so befuddled? It's because quantum mechanics,
which is the fancy way of saying science dealing with
the behavior of matter and light on those atomic and
subatomic scales, quantum mechanics has a different set of rules
of the road and we haven't fully figured those out yet.
(55:04):
It seems to agree with some established principles, models, and theories,
and then it kind of plays jazz with the rest
of it. You know, it treats the stop sign in
our earlier analogy like a suggestion, or it both stops
and doesn't stop at the same time, or you know,
it does every imaginable action until you look at it.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yes, yes, and there are actual quantum computers right now
that are functional in being worked on and being used
to simulate like we were talking about energy transportation right
or energy energy teleportation. There are quantum computers that use
these concepts right now to simulate what using those concepts
(55:52):
would be like to harvest energy from far falling places
and then store them inside themselves or inside other little
cubits in the same way. And all of it just
seems it just seems impossible because because for me, a
kid that grew up on the basic physics that were
(56:14):
understood in the mid nineteen nineties, all of this stuff
was so outside of the realm of possibility that it
really does. Man, I don't even know what I'm saying here,
just other than it doesn't seem possible that there is
a thing that exists as on and off in the
way we understand transistors, that is so tiny and you
(56:36):
can link those things up in some way and then
use those things to figure out stuff that our best
supercomputers can't do today. It doesn't compute there it is.
Speaker 3 (56:48):
Yeah, it's enough to make some people understandably want to
retreat back into Plato's cavern, you know what I mean, Like, yes, okay,
I get that it's possible, but I've feel like it
should not be possible. Where that's where, you know, you
get the old trope of the king shutting down the
(57:08):
research or people punishing Galileo. Sometimes current society will have issue,
will take issue with truths that science is figuring out,
or perhaps more dangerously, in this case, questions that science
is asking. You know, we're civilization is a little bit
better about it now, but the track record is not great.
(57:31):
There's a dirty jacket at play. Yeah, okay, let's go
to Cody Mure, writing for Quantum Magazine, who shares some
popular characters from a lot of thought experiments. There are
two infamous characters who are used pretty often, Alice and Bob.
(57:52):
So let's say Alice and Bob having a nice night
at home cooking dinner. All of a sudden, a series
of events occur. List drops a plate crash. The sound
startles Bob. Bob is cooking, he burns himself on the stove,
and reasonably he goes h. In another version of events,
(58:13):
Bob burns himself first and then cries out uh, and
this causes Alice to drop the plate crash. In classical physics,
only to your point, Matt, only one chain of events
is true A to Z one to two to three
right in linear time. In quantum mechanics, both of these
(58:35):
things can be true at once due to the phenomenon
known as superposition, and superposition is so cool, man.
Speaker 2 (58:43):
Well yeah, it's just Alice and Bob forever linked together,
burning themselves and dropping plates. Yeah, yeah, so cool. What
do you what do you think? What do you think?
The quantum quarks think about that or whatever they're called.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
They think everything at once, depending on how they're spinning.
You know what I mean? Sorry, man, this is familiar
right to any fan of fiction or film. You might
hear this loosely translated or popularized as the multiverse, And
like you were saying, Matt, all the particles exist in
(59:18):
all possible realities at once, up until the moment they
are measured. Maybe we think we're not sure. And I
feel like at this point in these conversations, just again
for transparency, Look, Tennessee, and Matt and I are not
(59:38):
currently high. It makes you feel like you're high when
you have to think about this stuff.
Speaker 2 (59:46):
Because you can hear this, my voice exists, and because
my voice exists, my mom had to exist, and because
she existed, the trees in the forest where my grandfather
grew up. You know, like all of that, all of
those things, when you think about the reality of it,
the true the true thrust of physics, trying to understand why,
(01:00:10):
why is? Why is right?
Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
What is? What is?
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
And why right?
Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
And again the damning dilemma, the bag of badgers that
we call the observable universe, which factors in human observation
of time. Right is the concept of linear time and
illusion filtered through senses that are inadequate for the totality
of reality. Is time simply one uh one nonlinear eternal
(01:00:41):
moment of the universe in some way experiencing itself through
different aspects? Is there as we're recording right now? Is
there still a moment in time where wherein Matt pursues
a different degree at Georgia State or at an entirely
different institution. Is there a world in which something like
(01:01:02):
meat does something very similar? Impossible questions to answer because
we only know the reality we can observe, and at
the risk of sounding cliche, that poses a logical issue
when we say observation may change things.
Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
Well, yeah, yes, I want to say it was last
year around this time, when I can't remember the Scientific
American or New Scientists on one of those publications wrote
something about how human brains alter time, But it's not
actually altering time. It's altering our perception of time. And
(01:01:40):
when it goes back to the observer concept of whether
or not just us observing anything, us observing the quantum level,
you know, for the first time in human history, does
that somehow alter how it functions? Or is it? Does
it all just function that way? And we're trying to
(01:02:02):
harness something you know that maybe maybe is outside of
our possible grasp just because of scale. Right.
Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
See also our conversation about the possibility of prescients or
prognostication and dreams right. And the quantum the quantum scale
function of the human brain. Right, it gets into some
very enjoyable but very treacherous waters. And with that idea
(01:02:34):
of you know, if we conflate, if we could correctly
conflate observation and consideration, think a consciousness thinking about a thing,
and then that counts as observation, right, And then that
could mean that we run into certain cognitive dangers info hazards. Right.
(01:02:56):
It's crazy, man, But I think all of this shows
us just how some purportedly ironclad laws of physics can
be and how they can truly fall short of explaining
the mechanics of what we know as reality and Matt,
we have not even explored black holes. We talked a
little bit about quarks, but we haven't gotten down into
(01:03:18):
the great pickle of what comprises a quark right now,
that's like the smallest thing. No matter how much energy
we throw at it, we can't break it into sub
quarks just yet. We haven't talked about that. We've alluded
to but have not examined technological breakthroughs that are both
powered by discoveries in physics and at the same time
(01:03:39):
powering new breakthroughs in the future. I mean, maybe it's
a story for another evening. Is this a part two?
Do we have a part two on this?
Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
You think, well, there has to be. There's a part
infinity of these episodes if we keep making them, because
stuff's getting weirder and weirder. There was a thing that
came out recently about fifty six Cuba quantum computer that officially,
for the first time, demonstrated certified randomness. Yes, we talked
about random number generators for a long time on the show,
(01:04:10):
and what does that mean and how do you get that?
And the new quantum stuff that we're talking about just
officially did it? Pretty pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
And there's a new pope, you know what I mean.
It's all Abouty's game.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
It's like maybe he can come in and really solidify
some of the stuff, you know, like yeah, how things.
Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
Weren't And Dylan asked, what if infinite parts of this
series already exist? Love it? Love the optimism there. Well, well,
at the very least, there is a universe, this universe
wherein we continue this show most importantly with you, fellow
(01:04:51):
conspiracy realist. I don't know, Matt, you know, in some
way to wax a little, a little too poetic. Perhaps
the first science isn't just this exploration of reality. It's
kind of a metaphor, right for humanity's unquenchable curiosity. I
(01:05:11):
sound like I'm in a weed shop or a dispenser
in California.
Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
Yeah, man, science be cool. Science is badass. It's just
some of the things that are happening. I can only
see them being weaponized some of Like when you're talking
about quantum advancements, it'd be a beautiful world if we
could actually use that stuff to make everybody's life better,
(01:05:39):
to make you know, to clean up the earth, to
make everything cool and hippie like that. I'll be down
with that. But it's not it's gonna be weaponized. It's
all gonna be weaponized until we can somehow drive all
the weapons you know, into dust.
Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Weaponized, commodified, Yeah, leveraged. I agree, especially with the constant
hunt for funding. Right that is, the best explanation or
the best historical pitch for funding is ultimately going to
be some kind of geopolitical edge or military application, which
(01:06:15):
is a shame. You know that war should be such
a great driver of innovation. But since the first moment
early humans looked at the stars, millennia and millennia go,
civilization is still I would say, even without the military applications.
Civilization is searching for a pattern right where we're taking
(01:06:36):
our thumb and forefinger and rubbing the weft and weave
of realities fabric, and we're always seeking a hole in
that substance, right, and maybe we can get behind the curtain,
maybe we can discover a vast conspiracy, right, the truth
that scientists and religious institutions have sought ever since we
(01:06:58):
thought to seek things. So, I don't know, man, it
looks like we just arrive at more questions than answers.
Is that a fair statement?
Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
I think so I'm just gonna sit over here and
rub the waft and weave.
Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
Well. While we do that, we want to hear from you.
What will we learn next? Should humanity? Should civilization keep
asking these questions? Or is there a moment where everybody
collectively says that's enough. We don't need to learn more.
We can't wait to hear your thoughts. You can find
us online, YouTube, Instagram, any social media that you may sip.
(01:07:37):
We are conspiracy stuff, conspiracy stuff, show some derivative thereof.
You can also find us via telephone and email.
Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Yeah, our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. When
you call in, you've got three minutes for a voicemail,
give yourself a cool nickname. Let us know if we
can use your name and message on the air. In
the message, please do say that. And hey, if you
want to contact us another way, why not send us
a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
We are the entities that read every piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. In multiple universes,
the void writes back, what do we mean? You can
find out by playing along at home conspiracy at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Stuff They don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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